


Silence

by rathernotmyname



Series: Fictober! 2020 [5]
Category: The Pacific (TV)
Genre: Angst with a Hopeful Ending, Bazil the Bunny, Fictober! Day 5, Fluff and Angst, M/M, Maelys the Bunny, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Rabbits, Snaf Is Sad
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-10
Updated: 2020-12-10
Packaged: 2021-03-09 21:35:50
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,579
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27993120
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rathernotmyname/pseuds/rathernotmyname
Summary: One thing Snafu would have never anticipated when returning home was learning to detest silence.Luckily, a temporary cure for his loneliness hops into his life, unexpected but very welcome.
Relationships: Merriell "Snafu" Shelton & Eugene Sledge, Merriell "Snafu" Shelton/Eugene Sledge
Series: Fictober! 2020 [5]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2050200
Comments: 2
Kudos: 4





	Silence

**Author's Note:**

> Author's note:  
> I DO NOT CONSENT TO MY WORK BEING HOSTED OR REPOSTED ON ANY UNOFFICIAL APPS OR WEBSITES OTHER THAN ARCHIVE OF OUR OWN WITHOUT MY APPROVAL, PARTICULARLY APPS WITH AD REVENUE AND SUBSCRIPTION SERVICES.

One thing Snafu would have never anticipated when returning home was learning to detest silence.

The war had been a constant source of noise. Gunfire, the dull ringing in his ears from the mortars, rainfall and mud splashing underneath his shoes, and then crickets and Eugene’s warmth next to him, alive, always there, never leaving him in quietness. 

New Orleans was not the place for idyllic silence, not really, if you counted the screaming children next door and the street musicians that came around two times a day to play underneath the local Maw-Maw’s window because she was too weak on her feet to go to the port to see them like in the old days.

However, the children had to go to school, and the old lady had to have her afternoon nap, and Snafu dove headfirst into unbearable, suffocating silence, day after day after day.

He tried to counteract it with the half-broken radio he had purchased for a buttered bread on the market, and when the screechy sounds coming out of the dented speakers didn’t do the trick, he started to wash his dishes as loudly as possible. 

It still didn’t help, but now he had clean dishes all the time, which was certainly a plus.

The silence began to hit him so hard that he considered ordering the musicians to stop by his house, too. If anyone had come to see him, they would have often found him pressing his wrists or palms to his ears to listen to his own heartbeat, desperate for this particular white noise that seemed to be the only thing able to keep him from going insane after all. 

The wood mill had its own version of noise, but it wasn’t what Snafu needed. The shrieking of the saws hurt his ears, and more often than not he found himself longingly sighing over ear mufflers in shop windows, far too expensive for him to buy, even if he so happened to save his salary for two entire lifetimes. 

Sitting on a low wall that surrounded the market, he smoked like a chimney, focused on the soft whispering crackle of burning paper and tobacco. The crowd around him was a comforting mixture of drawled English and loud, rapid-fire French. He didn’t bother to follow the conversations around him, content in basking in the fall sun and escaping his old nemesis Silence, no matter how dissatisfying and wrong the noise felt. 

His dangling right leg lightly hit something soft when he let it swing to the side. The thing twitched violently, but didn’t move away from his leg, seemingly too scared to move or too cornered to do so. 

Snafu looked down. A rabbit, brown, as big as his palm and quivering like a leaf, stared back.

He blinked, lifted his leg away and crouched before the terrified animal. 

“Heya, little bunny,” he said, voice rough from disuse. 

The bunny’s eyes were bulging out of its little skull, tiny flanks heaving at a dizzying speed.

“No need to be scared, I’m not in the mood for stew today,” Snafu told it, feeling guilty as soon as he had spoken the words. But who cared? The rabbit couldn’t understand him, anyway. 

He carefully stretched out a hand in the rabbit’s direction, wary about the possibility of it biting him and making him pay for a visit at the Doctor’s which he really couldn’t afford until next month. 

The rabbit didn’t bite and let itself be picked up and cradled between Snafu’s large hands. Eugene had playfully mocked him for them once. “Those big ole’ hands on those skinny wrists,” he’d said, smiling as he did just for Snafu, eyes crinkling in affection. 

Snafu hadn’t been able to bear the indescribable feeling somewhere behind his navel and had made a crude joke about them having just the perfect shape for fisting, and Eugene had burst into delightedly horrified laughter and never spoke of it again. 

The rabbit was warm and fluffy and fit just right into his palm, just like Eugene’s hand had—

Well. 

“Where’d you come from, huh?” he muttered, stroking a finger over the soft light-brown pelt. 

His question was answered quickly.

“Hey!” 

The shout made Snafu stretch his neck to look over the heads of the crowd with little success. 

“Hey you! Poirot!”

“Don’t get your panties in a twist, didn’t do nothing,” Snafu grumbled when the giant of a man crashed through the crowd into his direction. 

“Did ya steal it?” the man snapped, staring angrily at the poor bunny clutched in Snafu’s hands. 

“Naw. Found it back yonder,” Snafu replied, lifting the bunny to his chest protectively, stroking its back all the way. 

“Well, if y’ wanna have a nice meal tonight, you gotta pay for it.” The man stared him down, looking for a chance to start a fight. 

Snafu found himself curiously weary. Usually he’d have given the rabbit into the save hands of the carpet seller’s kid next to him and decked the guy, but right now he just wanted to cuddle this fucking bunny and search for some nice noise they both could enjoy. 

“Fine, whatever.”

He followed the vendor back to his stall, gave the bunny back so it could be safely stowed in a wooden box (he quickly said that he would do the “preparation” himself, and the vendor shrugged and put the knife away) and after a few seconds of thinking, he bought the only other remaining rabbit as well, an even smaller white one with long ears. 

Maybe they were friends. The thought of what would become of it if he didn’t buy it made him sick to his stomach.

He stole a few armfuls of hay from a chicken pen on his way home and distributed it on the floor of his studio apartment, just underneath the window and directly over the pipe that carried warm water. It was basically the warmest spot in his entire living space.

“Nice ‘n’ cozy,” he told the two rabbits who were now curiously exploring their new home. Snafu knocked out one side of the wooden box to build a makeshift house for them since he vaguely remembered that rabbits liked little spaces where they could retreat.

“We ain’t so different, you know,” he mused while filling a shallow plate with water for them to drink from and searching for a nice carrot to feed them. “I like myself some little spaces. High spaces, too. Might be where we differ.”

The white rabbit turned his long ears into his direction. Snafu had quickly and respectfully checked their equipment and overall health, and now knew that he was blessed with a lady bunny and a gentleman bunny. 

This was definitely not how he’d planned to end his day.

“Looks like I’ll have to hold back from the booze to buy y’all salad from now on,” he told his new roommates, who had taken to make comical little hops around his kitchen, fluffy asses thrown into the air so high they almost flipped themselves on their backs.

“I hope that means you’re happy.” 

Snafu grinned and watched them race each other around his rickety kitchen table, the soft clicking sounds of their paws on the wooden floor a soft disruption of the silence waiting for its grand entrance. 

While the white rabbit, who he’d christened ‘Bazil’, was contently munching on the carrot Snafu held for him, the other one (Maelys) suddenly jumped onto his bed.

“Fuck me sideways,” Snafu exclaimed with more delight than it was probably appropriate, “you do like high places! Who’d’ve thought. I sure didn’t. Did you, Bazil?”

Bazil’s unimpressed munching told him that he very well knew what the lady of the house was capable of. 

At least that was what Snafu read from his unmoving ears. He was going to become a bunny-whisperer before long. Maybe that was an enterprise worth investing in. Maybe have his own practice, like Eugene’s papa—

With the feeling of a good punch to the face, the silence was back, almost physically in the way his ears seemed to shy away from it by seemingly drilling themselves deeper into his head. Even though it wasn’t really like that, it still sure felt mightily uncomfortable.

“Oh, goddamnit,” he whined, and this time two pairs of ears turned into his direction. 

“Don’t you mind me,” he told them, putting the carrot on the ground and climbing into his bed. 

A soft ‘plop’ made him aware that a second bunny now dwelled on his bed, and both slowly hopped their way to the pillow. Maelys sniffed at his face while Bazil cleaned his paws, and then they curled up next to each other, looking like two round little bunny-pillows, ears relaxed and eyes comfortably half-closed. 

Snafu breathed in the salty, warm scent of rabbit fur, suppressed a sneeze as their hair tickled his nose, and closed his eyes.

Only when he zoomed in on the calm, quiet breaths of his new companions and their quick little heartbeats that were thrumming against his pillow, he noticed that he had finally found the right white noise he had searched for – the most natural signs of existence of another living being than himself; breathing, plain and simple. 

Snafu gently stroked his hand down two pairs of long ears and thought of Eugene and a piece of paper with an address scrawled on it tucked deeply into the pocket of his dress blues.

**Author's Note:**

> This is part 1 of my Bunny!Verse. I like bunnies. Snaf likes bunnies. Bunnies like Snaf. Mutual love? Hell yes.  
> In every story Eugene and Snaf adopt a dog or a cat, so why not a rabbit? This was my main reason for this story. It's very self-indulging, I have to admit that.  
> Thank you for reading.


End file.
